On-line companies offer a variety of products and services including on-line trading; software products for sale; information on advisors in various area; advice from national experts at high profile companies; advice from in-house advisors; various financial products; and other products and services. While some of these companies also offer advice, clients generally do not have the ability to interact with multiple advisors with various areas and levels of expertise.
Generally, a client may have more than one advisor which may include other sources of information to assist the client in managing the client's assets and other aspects of the client's life and/or business. Advisors from different disciplines that serve common clients lack a centralized tool to interact, communicate and share resources. The current industry model is hampered by a fragmented planning and implementation process, with separate advisors acting independently rather than as a collaborative team. Advisors may duplicate efforts and may rely on old or inaccurate data. Separate advisors oftentimes are unable to simultaneously access current data and historical documents pertaining to their common clients.
This is largely due to the time consuming, cumbersome and inconsistent communication methods of the existing services. The effects of this traditional system have been inefficiencies, such as missed project deadlines, uninformed team members, wasted resources, lost time and expenses, squandered planning opportunities, and frustrated and confused advisors and clients.
For example, some advisors may create work products, such as financial plans, legal documents, tax returns, financial statements etc., while others may place and/or manage products, such as investment accounts, insurance policies, annuities and retirement plans. In either case, the work being done by a particular advisor may directly or indirectly affect the other advisors working for that client. Often, advisors of a client may be from different disciplines and different firms. Generally, advisors lack a common tool to interact, communicate, and serve the client in a coordinated manner. Currently, there is no common place where the client's financial history, for example, resides to insure informed decision making and effective implementation rationale. This is a liability for both clients, advisors, and other participants.
Electronic information processing and communication systems are playing an increasingly important role in coordinating business operations among various participants in a community (e.g., the financial community). Among other functions, these technologies may be utilized for coordinating administrative operations, disseminating information or documents for review and retention, individual access to investment information, reference and research libraries and providing information inputs for ongoing financial, legal, investment and other support and functions. Currently, these activities are disjoint and provided independently of each other. In addition, many vital services and activities as well as important investment and/or reference information are not provided in an automated way. Client/advisor history is typically kept in off line data storage and is cumbersome to review and disseminate. Further, the client to advisor interaction suffers from much lost productivity and opportunity due to delays in communication and coordination between the parties (particularly in cases where many advisors are to be included on the clients' support team). With the advent of multiple discipline practices in the advisor and other communities, many of these issues may become exacerbated due to lack of consistency and standardization.
Historically, clients and advisors had to communicate via telephone, mail, e-mail, facsimile, in person meetings, and/or conference calls, for example. Various problems and difficulties often result from such communication methods when dealing with a team of advisors or other participants. For example, advisors and clients may have difficulty in scheduling times and places for face to face meetings or conference calls. Also, delays may result due to sending documents to all of the team members who may need to review the documents. In addition, incomplete decision making often result due to information or documents not being available to all parties involved. Other problems include wasted time and costs involved in sending documents as well as difficulty of coordinating document revisions or other actions. Such problems and difficulties add up to delays in completing the transactions, higher overhead costs, lost financial opportunities and frustration all around.
These and other drawbacks exist with current systems.